


The Garden of Scars

by falafelfiction



Category: Dark (TV 2017)
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Missing Scene, Post-Apocalypse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-09-26
Packaged: 2021-03-06 15:47:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 21,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26181391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/falafelfiction/pseuds/falafelfiction
Summary: Jonas doesn't know how long he'll be stranded in Winden after the apocalypse. But with only Noah, Claudia and Elisabeth for company, he fears his sanity isn't going to survive this time he's being forced to live through.
Relationships: Elisabeth Doppler/Noah | Hanno Tauber, Jonas Kahnwald & Claudia Tiedemann, Jonas Kahnwald & Noah | Hanno Tauber, Jonas Kahnwald/Martha Nielsen
Comments: 115
Kudos: 103





	1. The Chernobyl Game

**Author's Note:**

> I'm finally writing Dark fic set in the apocalypse era. This will be a series of chronological one-shots set between 2020 and 2052. It will be Jonas centric, exploring his transition into the Stranger, and his relationships with Noah, Claudia and Elisabeth. No idea how many chapters I'll write, seeing as it's a big stretch of years to cover. Feel free to prompt me if there's anything you'd like to read about from this time frame. I intend to keep installments short so I can update often.

When he was little, Jonas was scared of going down to the basement.

His father said it was because of the morning he saw the ghost on the stairs. Jonas had been putting on his coat, getting ready to go to school, when he heard a voice. A voice he felt sure was calling his name. Even now he remembers opening the basement door and seeing the girl with the dark hair and the sad eyes, just standing there. He had pointed to her, but his father insisted there was nothing there. No ghost girl staring out of the shadows.

In the weeks Jonas spends sheltering in his basement after the apocalypse, he sees no ghosts. But now he’s far more afraid of the dead girl in the house upstairs.

And she’s not the only thing that he’s scared of. As he stands at the foot of the steps, staring up at the door he’s bolted shut, Jonas swears he can hear footsteps. Someone is crossing the kitchen floor above him. He grips a cooking pot in one hand, ready to use it as an improvised weapon if this intruder forces their way into his cellar hideaway. Jonas hasn’t had to deal with looters ransacking his house yet, but he knows that it can only be a matter of time.

The intruder just knocks and calls to him calmly from the other side of the door.

“I know that you’re down there. It’s Noah. Let me inside.”

Jonas flinches, recognizing the voice. He remembers it belonging to the younger Noah who he met in 1921.

He grits his teeth, tensing his grip on the saucepan handle.

“What are you doing here?” he asks sharply. “What do you want?”

“I’m hungry,” the voice answers. “I’m looking for food.”

Jonas opens his mouth to tell Noah to get out of his house. To go scavenge somewhere else.

Then he hesitates, thinking back to when he first met this teenage Noah. To when he had been starved, feverish and injured, and Erna had taken Jonas in at her tavern, feeding him his first decent meal in months. He remembers Noah appearing on the landing, his cool blue stare settling on Jonas as he announced that the chamber was ready. Jonas had made it all of two paces towards the stairs before collapsing in a faint. But he had woken the following day to find that someone must have carried him up to the guest room, dressed him in a clean shirt and bandaged his still bleeding wounds. And there was Noah sitting quietly at his bedside, looking like he had been watching over Jonas all night.

Now Noah is the stray at his door. If Jonas has a debt of hospitality to settle, then he guesses it’s best to let Noah in and get it over with. He slides back the bolt.

“Take what you need, then go,” Jonas mutters, trudging back below.

Noah follows him down, surveying Jonas’s little basement camp, his bed roll and sleeping bag on the floor, his gas stove and cooking pots nearby, his torch and Geiger counter spilling from the top of his battered rucksack. Noah’s eyes sweep over the shelves that line the surrounding walls. Shelves packed with canned foods and bottled water.

“Your father was a prepper,” Noah remarks with an approving nod. He reaches for a can of soup, his lips quirking into a smile. “That’s a new word I’ve learnt lately.”

“It was my Mama,” Jonas corrects him. “She always warned us that we had to be prepared in case of an accident at the nuclear power plant. Another Chernobyl.”

It had been Jonas’s mother who had helped him to overcome his fear of ghosts in the basement...in her own weird way. He was seven when she had sat him down and warned him about the dangerous power plant in their town and all the deadly radiation that would come spilling out if it blew up one day. His mother had said if that ever happened, then they would have to run down to their basement and lock themselves inside to stay safe. It became a little family ritual to take one can from the weekly shopping and add it to their apocalypse supplies. They made a game of it. Sometimes his dad would yell ‘BOOM!’ at the dinner table and they would all scream and run down the stairs, pretending to take shelter from nuclear winds.

He misses his parents all the more, not having them here to play the Chernobyl game with him. Instead he has Noah marching in from the ruins of Winden, blithely indifferent to the devastation that they are now living in. Noah plucks the saucepan from Jonas’s weakening grasp and sets about lighting the stove and heating up soup. Jonas retreats into a corner, hoping that Noah will eat fast and then leave him alone. But once the soup is warmed, he pours it out into two bowls and places one on the floor before Jonas. Noah’s blue eyes are stern as he watches Jonas taking reluctant spoonfuls into his mouth. In the weeks he’s been sheltering here, Jonas has been forgetting to eat, not caring to look after his health, just letting himself grow thin.

“You shouldn’t stay here alone,” says Noah, seeming oddly concerned.

He’s already shaking his head. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

Jonas doesn’t add that the main reason he’s stayed here so long is that he’s been waiting for his mother. He doesn’t know why she wasn’t home on the day of the apocalypse. But if she’s survived the blast then surely at some point she’ll come back to the house. He doesn’t want to leave and miss her. He doesn’t want to accept that she’s probably dead too. That he’s lost everyone.

“You should find Claudia then,” Noah suggests. “Adam says that…”

“I don’t care what Adam says!” he snaps. “I don’t care why he sent you here or what your mission is, because I’m not going to do anything you tell me! I want _nothing_ to do with you!”

Noah just smiles serenely, Jonas’s rage bouncing off him.

“I wasn’t sent here for you. There’s someone else who I’m meant to protect.” He tips his head to one side, his greasy hair falling over his brow. “But Adam did say that we’d become friends…over time.”

Jonas glares at him hard. “You can’t believe anything he says.”

Noah snorts a laugh as if Jonas has made a mildly amusing joke. Then he sets down his empty soup bowl, rises to his feet and nods towards the basement stairs.

“I brought something for you. It’s outside. Come and see.”

Jonas hesitates before following him up the steps. Given that it’s Noah, he is expecting it to be a dead body or a severed head or something. Instead, Jonas steps outside to find a beautifully carved wooden cross propped up against his front door.

“What’s this?” he asks, his voice tight and tense.

“I was an apprentice to the town carpenter for two years back in my…”

“Why have you brought me this?!” he demands.

Jonas doesn’t hide the accusation in his tone and Noah’s stare doesn’t deny it. Yes, Jonas knows who Noah has made this cross for. He’s already seen it in the Winden cemetery of 2052. Only when he’d seen it there it had Martha’s name painted on its wood.

“You need to bury her,” Noah tells him.

Jonas bows his head, his eyes burning with tears.

“Go away,” he murmurs. “ _Please_.”

He screws up his face and takes a few calming breaths.

When he dares to look up, Noah is gone, vanished into the mist.

Jonas heaves a sigh, then reaches out with trembling hands and picks up the cross. He carries it through the hall and passed the kitchen, halting a moment to stare at the dark blood stain on the floorboards. He continues upstairs to the attic, yet another haunted room in his devastated home. His eyes look first to the rafters and then down to the floor.

The floor where Martha’s body lies zipped inside a sleeping bag.

In those first few days after the world ended, Jonas hadn't been ready to bury her. But he knew that he couldn't just leave her lying there in the kitchen either. Her body had been heavy in his frail arms as he had carried her upstairs, but it was nothing compared to the dead weight his heart had become. Jonas felt a little better about Martha being up in the attic. Like he was keeping his most beloved ghosts in the same place. But still, he knew he couldn't hide her up here forever.

He knows he must do this now. He should've done it already. He can’t keep waiting around the house hoping that his mother will come home and help him through this. He walks over to the shelves still filled with his father’s art supplies. He takes a can of white paint and the largest of the letter stencils, then sits down in the chair.

He places the cross against the wall and paints on her name.


	2. Graveyard in a Ghost Town

Jonas wakes in the bunker to find Claudia standing over his bed.

“We’re taking the day off,” she says. “You need a break.”

Jonas opens his mouth to protest but finds that his throat is raw and aching. Yes, he remembers now. He woke up screaming three times during the night, most likely disturbing Claudia’s rest too. His apocalypse companion is quickly becoming aware of his unmedicated PTSD symptoms, much like her older self did during the year that Jonas spent travelling with her.

“What else is there to do besides work on the God Particle?” he mutters.

It’s not like they can go to see a movie together or visit the zoo. As much as Jonas would like some respite from their tedious work in the ruins of the power plant, the work is the only thing he has to distract him from the irradiated hellhole he now lives in.

“We’ll take some time to remember who we’re doing this for.”

Claudia nods for Jonas to follow her up the steps. There’s a little twist in Jonas’s gut that tells him that he shouldn’t do what Claudia says. That there’s a reason he didn’t go looking for her in the immediate aftermath of the apocalypse. That he can’t trust her anymore. She knew how Martha was going to be killed. She must have known. And she never told him. They spent a full year together and she didn't say a word.

When they finally came back together, Jonas had rowed with Claudia long into the night. Or rather, Jonas had fumed and raged for hours, while Claudia just waited patiently for him to calm down. Over and over again, Jonas had blamed her for the secrets and lies of her older self. He had stormed around the bunker, waving in frustration at the stupid broken time machine on her table. When he had exhausted all his anger, Claudia had simply sighed and asked Jonas if he wanted to stay with her. He’d wiped away his hot tears, nodded and gone to the Kahnwald house to collect his supplies. The truth was he needed Claudia. She knew about the Cesium. She could stabilize the Particle. He couldn’t do it alone.

And today, Jonas can’t do it at all. He can’t face the long hours of failed experiments in that stinking yellow boiler suit. So he follows Claudia into the woods. He follows her to the cross with the name ‘Regina’ crudely carved into its wood. The grave of the woman he now knows to be Claudia’s daughter and who he’d known in his own time as Mrs Tiedemann, the mother of his former best friend. Jonas can remember sitting in their living room playing video games with Bartosz and Mrs Tiedemann glaring at him from the kitchen, like Jonas was a stain she was itching to remove from their plush brown sofa. Jonas doesn’t share this memory with Claudia. He’s silent at her side, giving her the space to mourn.

Next they trudge out to the old Winden churchyard, so Jonas can visit Martha and his father. Jonas usually comes here alone and is used to finding the cemetery empty. But this morning there are two figures standing in front of a cross that Jonas swears wasn’t there the last time he stopped by. One of the mourners is a girl around ten who sinks to her knees and lays a clutch of ragged thistles on this new grave. A taller boy stands beside her, his palms folded, and his head bowed. Jonas’s blood runs cold the moment he recognizes who it is.

“That’s him,” Jonas hisses to Claudia, pulling her to a halt. “That’s Noah.”

Jonas has warned Claudia that Noah is around. That he’s been sent to this decimated future by Adam for some sinister purpose. He’s warned her about the person Noah will become, the terrible things he’ll do, and that they cannot trust a word he says.

“That girl…” Jonas murmurs urgently, drawing close to Claudia’s side. “She’s not safe with him. Not knowing what he'll do to those other kids in the future. We…we need to get her away from him. We have to protect her from him...”

Claudia catches hold of Jonas’s arm before he can march over and attempt an impromptu rescue. “Jonas…he hasn’t done those things yet. You are judging him by the things that his future self has done. The same as you did with me.”

Jonas isn’t listening. He shakes off her grasp, ready to storm over there and fight Noah if he has to. Then the girl at the grave rises and turns to face him. That's when he stops dead in his tracks, seeing that it’s Elizabeth Doppler.

Of course. Jonas knew Elizabeth would be here, but it still shocks him to see her again. To see her at this age. Elizabeth blinks away tears as she stares back at him, seeming rather less surprised. Noah must have told her that Jonas was around too. He watches as Elizabeth reaches into her pocket, takes out a little note pad and scribbles something upon it. She rips out the page and hands it to Noah, who then walks towards Jonas with her note extended in his hand. Jonas looks down at its scrawled message.

 _I can’t believe you managed to survive_ , it says.

Jonas can feel the childish sarcasm dripping from her written words. Looks like the little Doppler girl had judged him to be too dumb to live through this disaster and is baffled to see him standing here, still drawing breath. He looks up to catch Noah smirking over the note. Jonas tries to move around him, but Noah raises a hand, barring his path.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you right now,” he says softly. “She’s not ready to be around other people after what happened. Leave it for a few weeks. Then come find us at the caves. We'll be waiting for you.”

Before Jonas can protest, Noah takes brisk strides back to Elizabeth’s side. The two of them take hands and together they walk away. Jonas swallows and takes a few more nervous steps towards the new grave where Elizabeth had laid down her thistles.

He reads the inscription on its cross.

_Peter Doppler_   
_You will live again in Paradise_   
_Sic Mundus Creatus Est_

A gasp escapes Jonas’s lips and a shudder passes through him. Not only at finding that his old therapist is dead (he knew Dr Doppler was dead, they're all dead...), but at seeing the specific words used to memorialize him.

“I know those two kids,” says Claudia, wandering over to Jonas. “They were with me and Regina in the bunker when it happened. The girl’s father was with her too.”

“Not anymore,” says Jonas, nodding to the grave. “This…this is how it starts. This is the beginning of the lies. Noah’s the one who puts this Paradise bullshit in her head!”

“Jonas,” Claudia sighs. “They’re just kids. And if she’s lost her father, then…”

“She won’t always be a kid! One day…one day there will be bodies hanging from every tree!” He tugs his scarf down, showing Claudia the scar on his throat. “She’ll put nooses around the necks of the faithless! And all because of this prophecy, this paradise...”

Suddenly Jonas is struggling to breathe. He feels like the rope is tightening around his windpipe once more. The face of the older Elizabeth Doppler flashes into his mind. The cold merciless way that she had stared at him as he had stood teetering on the scaffold. Jonas feels a stinging sensation in his leg where her bullet struck. He buckles at the knees and sinks to the ground, his skin breaking out in a cold sweat, his stomach lurching.

Claudia crouches down and puts her arms around him. It’s not really a hug. It’s more like Claudia has read an instruction manual on hugs and she’s copying the position she’s seen in the diagrams, trusting it will produce the desired effect. After a year traveling and training with her older self, Jonas knows Claudia is a woman with many strengths and skills. But offering comfort has never been one of them.

“You…you don’t know,” Jonas murmurs to her. “You’ve not seen her in the future. You’ve not seen what she becomes. Or what Noah will become.”

“Jonas…is it anything worse than what you've seen _yourself_ become?”

He buries his face in her shoulder, breaking down in sobs. Because yes, deep down there is no future self that Jonas hates and fears more than his own. It’s just easier to be angry at everyone else for the dark turns that he has seen them take later in life. Jonas still can’t accept that he might be on the same treacherous path. He has to believe he can change it.

“Don’t judge everyone so hard for things they haven’t done yet,” she suggests. “For now…you’re all just kids. Kids in need of a mother.” She pauses to sigh once more. “And instead, you’re stuck here with me...”


	3. Words over Smoke and Ashes

Jonas halts in the road, glancing over his shoulder.

“Why are you following me again?” he asks.

Noah steps away from the burnt-out truck that he was doing a bad job of hiding behind. He strides forward, closing the gap between them. Then he raises a finger at the ruins of the old Tiedemann house that Jonas had been heading towards.

“I just wanted to tell you you’re wasting your time. Looters turned over that house long ago. It’s the biggest place in town, owned by the man whose plant caused the apocalypse. They didn’t hesitate to break in and steal everything he owned.”

Jonas narrows his stare on the picture windows, now empty of glass.

“I think the looters may have missed something,” he says.

He continues up the driveway, edging around the front door that’s hanging off its hinges. He crosses through the ransacked kitchen with its cupboard doors open and their contents picked clean. Jonas halts at the foot of the stairs, looking behind him once more.

“Either come in or leave me alone,” he calls to Noah, who is still hovering at the threshold of the house. “I’m sick of you stalking me everywhere.”

Noah steps inside, looking a little sullen. “Claudia’s visiting Elizabeth at the caves again,” he says. “She’s brought a new book of sums for her to work through.”

Jonas just shrugs, unconcerned. Tutoring Elizabeth has become Claudia’s new project, her way of making friends with the Doppler girl and distracting her from her grief over her dead father and her lost mother and sister. Claudia said that it was important that a child her age continue to get some form of education. Apparently, she used to get paid to help Elizabeth’s grandfather with his schoolwork when they were both kids.

Jonas himself spent a year studying quantum physics, among other things, with Claudia’s older self. He knows she’s a tough but persistent teacher. He’s still learning from her now. Claudia made sure to loot the Winden library before other survivors got there and snatched up the books to use as kindling. She managed to grab a guide to sign language and insists on Jonas practicing it with her for at least two hours every night before they sleep. Her hands are already fluent in it, but Jonas has been slower to pick it up. The thought of speaking to Elizabeth still makes him a little nervous. He’s still keeping away from the caves.

“So why don’t you go back and do the math lesson with her?”

Noah doesn’t answer him. He just raises his head and stares at Jonas. And suddenly he looks like a lonely child in a playground. A child who is gazing out across the yard at the other loneliest kid in school and wondering why they can’t just be friends. Jonas can read it all in his pining eyes, even if Noah is too proud to say it out loud.

“Why have you come here?” Noah asks, avoiding scrutiny.

Jonas swallows. “My friend lived here. I’m looking for something that belonged to him.” He pauses then adds. “Well, not belongs exactly…we stole it together.”

He turns back to the stairs and heads up to the bedroom. The last day that they had hung out together, Bartosz had shown him where he was hiding Erik’s stash. He wanted Jonas to know just in case anyone talked to the police. He had been worried that Franziska might squeal to her mother just to spite him. If he wound up getting arrested, then Bartosz had asked Jonas to get here fast and move the drugs before they searched his room.

Jonas steps inside Bartosz’s old room now, climbs onto the blackened bed and begins tapping the wall above the headboard. He finds the part where its hollow, gets his fingernails under the wood and pulls it back to reveal his friend’s hidden wall safe, still sealed. Jonas turns its dial through the four-digit code and the door swings open.

“Jackpot,” he mutters, his voice flat and mirthless.

He takes out the stash of weed and pills, then sits on the mattress and spills out its contents. He’s surprised at how full the bag still is. But he supposes it makes sense. Bartosz never did like getting high alone.

“How did you know the combination?” asks Noah, who’s followed him upstairs.

“It was the highest score we achieved playing Minecraft,” says Jonas. “When we were twelve.”

Noah just blinks in confusion. Jonas guesses that Elizabeth hasn’t gotten around to explaining computer games to him yet. He can’t be bothered educating Noah on 21st century technology himself so just turns his attention to rolling a joint. Once this is done, Jonas sticks it between his teeth and blazes it up with the dying sparks of his lighter, inhaling deep into his lungs. He coughs and splutters, his eyes watering. Then he takes another drag. He glances to Noah, who is still just standing beside the bed, staring at him. It’s clear that he’s not going away. So Jonas shifts over on the mattress to make room and then holds out his joint to the other boy. He regrets his bit of charity almost instantly, as Noah sinks onto the bed beside him, taking the joint between his fingers, his lips lifting in a cocky smirk.

“So does this mean that we’re friends now?” he asks haughtily.

Jonas rolls his eyes. Noah reminds him of their predestined friendship almost every time they are together, as if that will eventually force Jonas to give in and go along with it.

“It just means I don’t like to get stoned on my own,” he says.

Noah’s smile falls and he looks a little stung. He takes a small puff and passes back the joint.

“What have I done for you to hate me so much?” he asks.

“For starters, you kidnapped me. You locked me in a bunker and were going to use me as a guinea pig for your death-trap time machine.” He takes another deep lungful of smoke and sighs it out. “Before I escaped by falling through a wormhole, that is...”

Jonas trails off, hesitating to tell Noah about the other boys his older self abducted, including the one whose drugs they were currently smoking. Those other boys who hadn’t returned from their stays in the creepy 80's bunker with its nursery school wallpaper. Jonas figures he’ll save that story for another night. Right now, he doesn’t want to spoil his high.

Noah just frowns, leaning back against the headboard.

“But I haven’t done those things yet. None of that’s happened yet.”

“It's happened for me,” Jonas snaps back. “So I figure...we can’t have been very good friends if you were going to use me as a test subject for your fucked up experiments.”

Jonas neglects to mention that his own future self had left him imprisoned in that bunker, even after he had burst into tears and begged to be let out. He shudders at the memory. Then he passes the joint back to Noah anyway, letting him take another toke. Noah sucks in a longer drag this time, tipping his head to one side.

“The boy you stole this hash with…were you good friends?”

A hard lump forms in Jonas’s throat. “No. I don’t think we were…” He slouches on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “A few days after we got our hands on this stash, Bartosz got a call from the dealer and set up a meeting with him. And he asked me if I would come along. To be his backup…you know? Because this dealer guy could have turned out to be a serial killer or something, right? So Bartosz asked if he could trust me. If he could count on me. And I…I said he could. Always.” He sighed. “Then I stood him up.”

Noah frowns, not seeming to understand this bit of phrasing.

“You mean…you betrayed him?”

Jonas shrugs. “I guess I did. And not just because I didn't show up that night. But because at the same time as I was meant to be meeting him, I...I was kissing his girlfriend. I was kissing Martha. But it...it wasn't just cheating. Me and Martha, we had something special together. And I think Bartosz knew that. I...I felt like he betrayed me first.”

He falls silent, thinking of the last time he had seen Bartosz. That day when they had fought in the rain outside the school. How Bartosz had shoved him in the chest and told him to never come back. Jonas wonders if his former friend was happy when he’d actually disappeared. Then he wonders if he should’ve taken some time before the apocalypse to find Bartosz, to make things right with him, to save his life.

But no. They never were very good friends.

“My father’s name was Bartosz,” Noah says suddenly.

Jonas flinches at this declaration, a chill passing through him.

“What…what was his surname?” he asks haltingly.

His chest tenses as a thought occurs to him. They hadn’t found Bartosz’s body. His picture hadn’t been put up on that wall of corpses in the army tent in the middle of town. Was there any chance that he might have…?

“Tauber. Our family name was Tauber.”

Jonas’s heart sinks once more. Yes, he supposes he was really reaching with that knee-jerk time travel theory. Still, there’s a tightness in Noah’s voice that makes him suspicious. He jerks his head around to see that the other boy has smoked their joint down to its filter and is now staring off into space, his eyes wet and shining.

“My father he…” A tear slips from his eye and he quickly scrapes it back with his knuckles, “…he died not long before I traveled here.”

“Oh…” says Jonas, raising himself onto his elbows, not sure how to deal with a Noah who has feelings and cries. “My Papa died too. He hung himself. It was my fault and I’m still trying to fix it. What…what happened to your father?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Noah mutters.

He hands back what little is left of the joint and rises from the bed. Jonas catches hold of his sleeve, tugging him back down onto the mattress. They may not be friends, but Jonas is not going to let Noah stagger around stoned and weeping in an apocalyptic wasteland filled with armed scavengers. Noah slumps on the battered bed-springs as Jonas digs his fingers back into Erik’s stash.

He fishes out two pills and places one of them in Noah’s palm.

“We don’t have to talk at all,” he says, swallowing his own pill dry.


	4. Queen of the Winden Caves

Jonas and Claudia trek through the forest at dusk. All is quiet around them until a military drone flies over, shining its floodlights over the ground below. They flatten their backs against the nearest tree trunk, keeping out of its dazzling white glow. The army are no longer occupying Winden. They gave its surviving residents orders to evacuate months ago, warning anyone who stayed that they would be setting up a blockade around their little wasteland town. Nobody gets in. Nobody gets out. And anyone who is seen within its perimeter is likely to be shot on sight.

The light from the aircraft passes over and nothing is fired down upon them. Jonas and Claudia are left in the shadows once more. They exchange nods, then continue their trudge through the woods until they come to the cave-mouth where Noah is waiting for them.

“I’ve told Elizabeth I’ll be back before midnight,” Noah says, seeming reluctant to leave.

“She’ll be fine,” Claudia assures him. “Jonas will be with her.”

Noah and Jonas give her the same squinting look, neither of them convinced that Jonas will be an effective bodyguard if some feral gang raids the caves while Noah is away. But Noah simply sighs and shoulders his rucksack, ready to follow Claudia to the power plant. After a week’s worth of arguments, Claudia has worn Jonas down with her insistence that they bring Noah into their work on the God Particle. Given that Noah has some knowledge of its twin back in the 1920s, he may be able to aid them in their ongoing experiments.

And while Claudia talks Noah through their operation, Jonas has been all but ordered to spend some time with Elizabeth. He steps into the shadows of the cave now, his orb torch and map in hand, weaving his way through the tunnels, trying to find the large cavern where Noah has set up camp. The spot where Elizabeth will be waiting for him.

Jonas finds himself shuddering as he remembers the first time that he was brought to see Elizabeth in these caves. His first day in the future. Silja had smashed him in the face with the butt of her rifle and he had woken up on the back of some sort of moving vehicle with a hood over his head, his hands tied behind his back and a boot stamped down on his hip to keep him still. When the juddering transport came to a stop, Jonas had been lifted to the ground, seized by the arms, and marched stumbling over a long stretch of uneven terrain. When the footfalls of Jonas and his captors began to echo, he knew he was being taken into the caves, like some human sacrifice brought to the labyrinth to feed the Minotaur.

Finally, he’d been shoved to his knees again, the bag ripped from his head.

“A stranger has come!” Silja had bellowed behind him. “A traveler from the past! But is he sent here by God or the Devil?”

There had been a ripple of murmurs around him. Jonas had blinked, his vision a little blurry from the blow to his skull. Slowly he had focused his sights on a rugged blonde woman carrying an assault rifle. She was blind in one eye, her face scarred, and her short hair tied back from her brow. Every head in the cavern was turned to her. She was like some apocalyptic queen who Jonas was meant to beg for mercy before.

“Please...what year is it?” he’d asked again, his voice shakier this time.

The leader hadn’t answered him. She had just stepped forward and seized his jaw. She took a small torch from her pocket and shone it right in his face. He hissed, squeezing his eyes shut as he felt her filthy fingers prizing his lips apart. She had been inspecting his teeth and gums, Jonas had realized later. He would soon learn the color your mouth turns after a few months living in a world without toothpaste. The woman had released him, stepped back a pace and began signing to the group who had brought Jonas to her.

It was only then that Jonas had guessed who this leader might be. The little deaf daughter of his therapist, Peter Doppler. Only the last time that Jonas had seen her, she had been around eight years old. Now she looked to be somewhere in her forties. And as Jonas had done the math, he had realized what year he must have landed in.

Whatever the older Elizabeth had signed, it must’ve amounted to – _Throw him in a cage till I figure out what to do with him_. The hard stare she had given Jonas as he was led away told him that this woman recognized him too. And for some reason she was angry with him, wanting to punish him, resentful of some great wrong he had done to her. Jonas had never found out what it was. After a few days, Elizabeth had let him out of his cage, but still insisted on Jonas having an armed guard with him at all times. Jonas hadn’t known whether to consider himself a prisoner or a protectee given his own security detail. As much as Elizabeth seemed to loathe him, she also appeared to be oddly invested in keeping him alive. It'd taken months before Jonas had slipped his guards and gone exploring on his own.

Jonas tries to shake off these dark memories as he rounds the next bend of the tunnels and arrives in the cavern where Noah has made camp. The Elizabeth who waits for Jonas holds a knife in her hand, her fingers tight around its handle, her jaw clenched tighter still. The girl has gone through a growth spurt since the last time Jonas saw her. She might be almost as tall as him now, though Jonas has never been overly blessed in the height department. Given the way that Elizabeth is clasping her weapon, Jonas wonders if he should raise his hands in surrender. Instead he gives her a wary look, and then signs to her.

_What are you doing with the knife?_

Elizabeth stares at him a moment longer, then buries her blade in a piece of deadwood at her feet. She raises her arms and signs back to him.

 _Practicing._ She sits down cross-legged. _Why are you here?_

Jonas frowns, sitting opposite her. _Didn’t Noah tell you I was coming?_

She rolls her eyes. _I told him I don’t need a babysitter. If anyone comes to rob us, just get behind me. I know what to do._

To emphasize her point, Elizabeth seizes the knife again, wrenches it from the wood and delivers another deep wound to its rotting bark. Jonas can’t help but flinch. He knows now how his former therapist was killed and what Elizabeth did to survive. And judging by the furious look in her eyes, she wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

 _Claudia wants Noah to help us_ , Jonas signs and speaks, exaggerating his mouth movements so she can lipread in case he is getting the hand signals wrong. _We are working on something at the old power plant. Something we can use to travel back and change things._

Elizabeth nods. _The part of God._

He winces, wondering if this is just her way of signing ‘God Particle’ or if Noah has made the malfunctioning time portal just another bit of his Sic Mundus mythology.

 _God has nothing to do with it_ , he signs back.

Elizabeth looks affronted. Her hands move a little more frantically.

_We don’t need that stupid thing at the plant. We have the passage. We are clearing away the rocks, trying to find the door. Noah said that there is a prophecy. That one day the passage will open again, and it will lead the faithful to a new world. It will lead us to paradise._

Jonas clenches his fists, feeling his stomach grow squeamish. He knows that Noah is a lost cause. That he’s been brainwashed by Adam’s cult since his earliest childhood and there’s nothing Jonas might say now to deter him from his blind faith. But he had wanted to believe there was still hope of deprogramming Elizabeth, even if he's seen evidence that she’ll be just as fanatical some thirty years into the future.

 _The prophecy is a lie._ Jonas takes his time, signing to her slow and clear. _There is no paradise. It doesn’t exist._

Elizabeth goes still for a moment, her hands unmoving, her stare icing over. Then she pulls the knife from the deadwood and begins sharpening it with a whetstone. Jonas can’t say he isn’t a little intimidated, but he lost his instinct for self-preservation long ago.

 _Noah is on a bad path_ , he signs next. _He will take you down a bad path too if you listen to him._

Elizabeth slams her knife down on the ground.

 _Noah said that you would be one of the faithless. He says that you will betray him one day. But that doesn't matter. Because in the future, you will change. Time will change you so much that you will become a different person with a new name. You will become Adam and Adam will be our savior._ She screws up her nose at him. _That was the part I found hardest to believe._

Jonas supposes that this is a fair slight, given his success rate at saving people so far. The mention of Adam raises his hackles though. For a moment, Jonas wants to sign something just as hurtful back at Elizabeth. Maybe ask her if she would like to know who kidnapped her friend Yasin and what happened to him after he was strapped into a prototype time machine. But he catches himself just in time. Jonas realizes if he forces all his traumatizing truths onto Elizabeth, she will just cling harder to Noah’s comforting lies.

 _What else did Noah tell you about me?_ he signs to her instead.

She softens a little, her head flopping to one side.

 _He told me about Mikkel_ , she signs. _That Mikkel got stuck in the past, grew up there and became your Papa._ She pauses before continuing in slow thoughtful gestures. _All the people who have disappeared in our town, they don’t have to be dead. It could just be that they traveled somewhere else. My mother and sister might still be alive, just in another time. And when the prophecy comes true, we will find each other again._

Jonas can’t hold back a snort. Elizabeth can’t hear it, but she seems to read the contempt on his face.

She raises her hands again. _You remind me of Mikkel._

 _I do?_ Jonas signs back.

She nods. _He was a jerk too._

With that, Elizabeth looks away from him, clamps her hands under her armpits and then sits slumped against a rock. And Jonas doesn’t need any further signal to tell him that this conversation is over for the evening.


	5. Cut Down from the Noose

Jonas sits on the edge of his bed in the bunker. The contents of the army issue first aid kit is spread out on the mattress and Noah crouches before him, soaking a cotton swab in the last dregs of their iodine. He dabs at the new rope burn around Jonas’s throat. The antiseptic stings his raw red skin, making it bleed afresh around the scar tissue left from last time.

Jonas doesn’t wince at the pain. He just silently absorbs it, feeling like he deserves it.

“I never asked you...” says Noah. “...how did this happen before?”

Jonas remains mute and still. Because what could he possibly say? Should he tell Noah that the twelve year old girl in his care will grow up to be a militant cult leader who’ll put Jonas through a mock execution after he breaks her sacred rules? Could he ask Noah if he will try talking Elizabeth out of lynching his younger self the next time around? No, it wouldn’t do any good. Nothing changes. Nobody is ever spared. Elizabeth will hang Jonas and anyone else she deems faithless and unfit for her paradise.

His old scars can’t be avoided. Neither can the ones still to come. One day, he’ll be a walking scar.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Noah says, his voice soft and consoling. “You just have to promise me you won’t try this again.”

Noah unravels a bandage and begins to coil it around Jonas’s neck. His fingers are gentle at first, but they become firmer as he tapes the dressing in place. The bandage feels like another noose. Or like a leash that Noah is using to tether Jonas to a world that he no longer wants to remain in. Jonas gives him no answer. He refuses to make him any promises, even as Noah holds his stare, tears threatening in his eyes, his concern shifting to frustration. He reaches out to clasp the sides of Jonas’s face, his palms cold and clammy against his cheeks.

“You can’t die,” he says through gritted teeth. “I need you. We all need you. Those of us who know the darkness long for the light. We long for a world that is purged of evil and pain. You must live so you can become the one who’ll lead us there. Adam promised us you would.”

Jonas swallows against the dull ache in his windpipe. When he had climbed up to his father’s old art studio, he thought he _had_ found a way to free himself from the pain of this world. A way to stop the evil growing inside him like a poisonous flower, cutting it off at its roots. If Jonas killed himself, he could never become Adam. Never become the man who murdered Martha or who tricked his younger self into triggering his father’s suicide. Without Adam, this ugly knot in time would unwind and all this sick shit would never have to happen.

“There’s only one way to escape,” Jonas rasps, his voice small and strangled.

Noah’s face turns a shade paler, but his eyes blaze with a fierce resolution.

“Not for you,” he whispers back. “I won’t let you go. And neither will time.”

“What is going on here?” a voice says suddenly from the stairs.

Noah releases his harsh grip on Jonas’s face and stands back from the bed. Jonas is vaguely aware of Claudia stepping into the bunker, hurrying over to sit on the mattress beside him. But he doesn’t turn to look at her. It was hard enough facing Noah after his failed suicide, let alone Claudia, the friend who is forever telling him not to lose hope.

“What happened to you?” she asks. “Were...were you attacked?”

Her voice is already wavering. She's smart enough to guess the cause of this new injury. Getting no answer from Jonas she looks up inquiringly at Noah. He shakes his head solemnly, which seems to confirm her worst fears.

“Oh Jonas...” she sighs, stroking a hand through his hair.

The three of them are quiet for a moment. And in that silence, Jonas feels like he is falling. He feels like he is tumbling through time with nothing to grab hold of and nobody to catch him. He will just keep falling helplessly for the rest of his life. And when he finally comes to land, there will be nothing left of the young man who he is now. There will only be Adam.

“Where were you?” Noah demands of Claudia, accusation in his tone. “He was with you at the power plant all morning. Couldn’t you see any warning signs? I’ve been telling you for months he might do something like this! I told you to watch him!”

Jonas blinks his eyes, his stare darting between Noah and Claudia. He’s surprised to learn the two of them have been talking about him, worrying over his state of mind and predicting that he might be a danger to himself.

“I…I knew that he was tired,” Claudia falters. “That he was depressed even. I knew that our fruitless work on the God particle must be getting to him. But I never thought he would try to…”

Noah cuts her off before she can finish. “You’re so wrapped up in your work and your big scientific ideas that you don’t think about people! You disappear without warning, leaving us for days, never telling us where you go. Where is it that you go?”

Claudia rises to her feet, standing her ground against Noah’s tirade.

“Where I go is none of your business! I need to get away from you all sometimes. I need time to just…be with myself.” She shoves her hands deep into her pockets, shaking her head. “I’m not his mother.”

Noah screws up his face at her. “Elizabeth is not my family either, yet I still care for her like she is kin. I have to return to the caves before it gets dark and she worries where I am.” He jabs a finger at Jonas. “I can’t be around to watch him all the time! I can’t take care of both of them on my own! You need to do your part. You need to keep him from…”

“I’m doing more than any of you!” Claudia explodes. “Our work on the portal is the only thing that gives him hope. Hope we might change things. It is you and your prophecies and your blind faith in his future self that is driving him to despair. Can you not see that?”

Jonas says nothing throughout their feud. Listening to Noah and Claudia bicker reminds him of his mother and grandma arguing over the decision to commit him to the Winden psychiatric institution. His Oma Ines insisted that Jonas shouldn’t be in the mental hospital at all. She kept saying that he just needed some air and sunshine, maybe a change of scene. Meanwhile his mother had been fretting that Jonas needed to be put on stronger anti-depressants and maybe a periodic suicide watch.

And at the time, Jonas hadn’t cared to make any decisions for himself. He had let people tell him what to do, let them ease his trauma and dull his pain as best they could. If he was being honest, he hadn’t minded those months that he spent in the nuthouse. That simple routine of mealtimes and medication. Nothing to do all day besides think of something to say in group therapy to convince his doctors that he was trying. In truth a small part of Jonas hadn’t wanted to be released back into the real world. He figured that he would probably end up a reclusive weirdo like his father. He always did take after him.

Jonas closes his eyes, remembering that day four years ago. The day that it all went wrong. He had traveled back to the summer of 2019 and it was the closest that he had come to going home. The last time he'd been held in the arms of a loving family member and he'd never wanted to let go. Jonas would have been happy to melt out of existence in that moment, if it meant that he could stop his father hanging himself in the attic. Because now when Jonas goes home, the old Kahnwald house is a blackened shell, full of ghosts. And the only way for Jonas to connect with his father is by tying his own rope to the rafters.

Jonas shudders, blinking his eyes open.

“I need some air,” he murmurs.

He gets up off the bed, stumbling towards the stairs. Noah and Claudia were still fighting over him, talking about him like he wasn’t there. Jonas had tuned out their voices, ignoring the rest of their heated words, leaving them to settle these long held grudges between them. But now as he flees from the bunker, he is aware of them halting their argument and hurrying out of the shelter after him. Once he’s up in the filthy irradiated air, Jonas breaks into a run. He doesn’t know why. His skinny legs carry him away on impulse. His chest aches, his lungs protest and his torn up throat wheezes for breath. But Jonas just keeps on running into the misty nothingness ahead of him.

Then Noah’s arms are clamping round his chest, forcing him to stop. Jonas hisses and struggles for a moment, but Noah is easily stronger. He goes limp in his hold, allowing himself to be restrained. He feels Noah’s breath heavy against his bandaged neck.

“There’s nowhere to go,” Noah pants. “You have to stay with us. _Please_...”

Noah buries his face in Jonas’s shoulder. And the next thing he knows, Jonas feels his hoodie growing damp with tears. When he had gone up to that attic, Jonas hadn’t even considered anyone grieving for him. In numb movements, Jonas reaches up and clasps the knuckles of Noah’s hands, which are still clinging to his chest, only now it is less of a tackle hold and more like a desperate hug. Jonas glances to the right where Claudia stands beside them, her own hands still in her pockets, though she is reaching for him with her stare.

Jonas looks to the ground. The three of them are standing before the splintering ruins of the Doppler cabin. The blast from the power plant blew off its roof and caved in its walls. But the foundations of the old woodland shack are still there, its rubble waiting to be rebuilt.

“I think I need to work on something different for a while...” he says, an idea forming.

Claudia follows his gaze and nods with a weary understanding. Noah sniffs, raising his head from Jonas’s shoulder. Slowly he loosens his hold while keeping a cautionary grip on Jonas’s arm. He is staring at the collapsed cabin now too, his face tensing with possibilities.

“We…we could work on it together,” Noah says haltingly. “We could scavenge for tools and timber to build new walls and put up a new roof. I could teach you how to do the woodwork.” He gives Jonas’s arm a comradely squeeze. “And…and when it’s finished, Elizabeth and I could come and live here. We could make this our new home.”

Jonas’s heart quietly breaks a little over the thought of building a home. He looks at Claudia and is surprised to find she’s raising up her eyebrows, seeming to approve of the proposed project. Jonas would have never imagined himself learning carpentry, but he needs to find something to do with his hands besides tying nooses.

“Okay,” he says at last. “We can try.”


	6. Yuletide in the End Times

There’s a lot that Jonas is forgetting as the years slip by.

Days of the week, months of the year, they all just blur together in an endless cycle of murky sunrises and desolate nights. And the only thing that changes is how they are all slowly aging. Claudia is in her fifties now, he and Noah in their mid-twenties and Elizabeth coming into her late teens. But it’s not like they celebrate birthdays anymore. The old practice of crossing off dates on calendars was abandoned long ago. Now the passage of time is marked in the grey strands taking over Claudia’s red hair, in the thickening beards on his and Noah’s chins and the new womanly curves on Elizabeth’s once spindly girlish frame.

It’s only when the four of them come together to hibernate through the nuclear winters that they even acknowledge that they have lived through another year. Another year stranded at the end of the world. Their survival is nothing to celebrate either. But as Elizabeth always reminds them, when the weather turns cold that means it must be close to Christmas.

And what kind of Germans would they be if they didn’t celebrate Christmas?

 _The wine is mulled_ , Elizabeth signs. _Pass me your cups_.

Jonas, Noah and Claudia hand their mugs to her in turn and she fills them with the liquid that’s simmering over their campfire. It’s not wine exactly. It’s a warm cocktail of whatever fruit and flowers, sugar and spices, she’s managed to scavenge for the brew. Elizabeth likes to remind them she’s reached legal drinking age now and before the apocalypse she’d never got the chance to taste Glühwein. This year she’s been determined to make her own. With Claudia’s help she’s built a still and learned the methods of moonshining. Jonas doesn’t care how her hot wine tastes, so long as it warms his belly and dulls his aches. So long as sharing in this festive custom brings Elizabeth a little happiness.

“What shall we drink to?” asks Claudia, raising her own cup.

Jonas shrugs and smiles. “To a world without Winden.”

Claudia and Noah offer him grim smiles in return. Jonas puts his mug down and signs his proposed toast to Elizabeth. She nods in approval and they bring their cups together over the fire, before taking tentative sips of the wine. They sit in silence, sharing glances, their eyes twinkling. The wine tastes good. Better than any of them were expecting. There isn’t much left in this wasteland to be savored, so this brew feels like a small miracle in Jonas’s mouth. And when their cups are drained, he, Noah and Claudia raise their hands, shaking their palms in the silent sign for applause. Elizabeth thrusts out her chin, proud of her work.

There’s a lot that Jonas is forgetting as the years slip by.

Most of all, he’s forgetting to be angry at the last three people he has left in the world.

Noah puts out the fire and lifts the still hefty vat of wine. There will be enough left for them to reheat and ration over the coming week. Together they rise from their tree stump seats, pull their blankets tight around their shoulders and head inside the cabin, the ramshackle hut that Noah and Jonas built together, five years ago, by hammering together any sturdy pieces of wood they could find. They’ve had to patch it up a few times in the years that followed, after storms blew struts off its walls and boards off its roof. But for the most part, it has held firm. And from the day Noah and Elizabeth left the caves to live out here, it’s started to feel like a home. Jonas sleeps there too now, leaving Claudia to have the bunker to herself, though she still walks over most nights for meals, company, and huddling round their fire.

Inside the cabin, a shaggy German Sheppard is sitting up on their moldy rug, blinking its eyes, its mouth stretching into a yawn. Jonas and Elizabeth hurry over and flop down on the floor beside the waking dog, stroking their hands over her matted fur, laughing as she licks their faces. This new pet had been Claudia’s present to them all this year. She’d brought it back from one of her long walks, saying that she found it lost and barking in the woods. She says she doesn’t know where the dog came from. She thinks it was perhaps a stray from the army barracks on the outskirts of town. That maybe the soldiers turned her loose after they could no longer feed her. The dog is bony and flea-bitten but has no viciousness in her. In just a few days she’s become a loyal member of their little family.

“Wakey wakey, Gretchen,” Claudia coos, stooping to stroke her too.

Jonas can’t help noticing that Claudia has an easier time showing affection to this animal than she does with her human companions. She named their new pet Gretchen after her childhood poodle, who she’s told them all was a fellow traveler, one she knows she will see again some day. Noah is the only one who keeps his distance from the dog. Partly because he is allergic to her fur, but mostly because he keeps saying to Jonas that they shouldn’t get attached to the creature. Their larder is very lean this year. If they’re starving then their dog will have to go in the pot, a suggestion he hasn’t dared share with Elizabeth yet.

“We should take her for a walk before bedtime,” Claudia suggests, signing to Elizabeth as she speaks. “It’s going to be a cold night and the exercise will keep her joints from going stiff.” She puts a leash around Gretchen’s neck and gently tugs her to her feet. “Come on,” she says to Elizabeth. “We’ll leave the boys to play their game.”

The game in question sits on a low table in the corner of the cabin, a chessboard with hand-carved wooden pieces. This had been Jonas’s gift to the group this year. Though in the week since he completed and bestowed the chess set, him and Noah are the ones who have been hogging it, sitting together for hours, playing dozens of games back to back.

Elizabeth pouts a little as she stands to leave. These days she has a tendency to get jealous when Jonas and Noah get wrapped up in something that doesn’t involve her. She reaches into her pocket, taking out a tube of lipstick, part of the make up collection she scavenged from her sister’s old room in the earliest weeks of the apocalypse. Elizabeth smears her lips red, smacks them together, then smiles.

 _In case I meet any cute boys on our walk_ , she signs with a playful shrug.

This causes Noah to sit up sharply, but before he can sign anything back, Elizabeth marches over and kisses him teasingly on the cheek. Jonas catches them both blushing a little as she draws back. He shares a knowing look with Claudia. Then as if wanting to prove she wasn’t singling Noah out, Elizabeth bends down to give Jonas a peck on the brow. The kiss he gets is rough and clumsy, more like a slap against his forehead. He rubs the lipstick mark off his head immediately, but Noah allows his own red kiss to linger on his face.

Once Claudia, Elizabeth and the dog are out of the door, Jonas and Noah move the table to the center of the room and set out the pieces on the board. They help themselves to an extra cup of Elizabeth’s still warm wine, vowing they’ll go without tomorrow night. This evening they just really need to unwind. As the alcohol does its work on his sore muscles and stressed mind, Jonas finds it eerie how getting drunk and playing chess with Noah feels so much like getting stoned and playing video games with Bartosz some ten years ago.

It’s like having a friend again. Yes, Jonas supposes they are friends now. It was after his failed attempt at hanging himself that Jonas had finally given into it. Trying to take his own life had given Noah a valid excuse for stalking Jonas’s every move. Despite his belief that time wouldn’t allow Jonas to die, he wasn’t taking any chances. He’d recruited Claudia and Elizabeth as part of this suicide watch, the three of them taking it in turns to keep an eye on Jonas throughout the day, including when he went for a piss behind trees. Noah had stolen padded restraints from the old mental institution and fitted them to the bed in the bunker. Claudia had sided with Noah in insisting that Jonas be strapped to the mattress overnight so he couldn’t try anything while she slept. It had taken weeks for Jonas to earn back their trust, convince them he wasn’t going to do himself harm again. Weeks of Jonas feeling like he was being held prisoner in his own body and this broken world.

At first, Jonas told himself to just pretend to be Noah’s friend, if only so he’d be allowed a little freedom and privacy once more. They had worked together on constructing the cabin, though Noah hadn’t let Jonas handle any of the sharp or heavy tools. It’s taken five years of good behavior and supervised carpentry lessons before Noah finally gave Jonas his own carving knife and allowed him to work by himself. The first thing he had done was set to work on the chess set, fashioning each of its pieces by hand, painting them with the black and white dregs of his father’s art supplies. It was his Christmas present to them all, but really it was a gift for Noah. A thank you for letting him have his independence back.

Jonas still doesn’t know whether he should call that friendship or Stockholm syndrome. All he knows is that playing chess with Noah is fast becoming one of the better parts of his day. So either he’s finally lost his mind or he really isn’t having to pretend anymore. Maybe it’s a combination of the two? He tries not to think about it too hard.

“Elizabeth says she was wearing lipstick on the first day she met me,” Noah says abruptly after they have been playing in silence for several minutes. The red kiss mark is still visible on his cheek.

Jonas frowns. “You mean, during the apocalypse?”

He shakes his head. “No, before that. When she met my older self.”

Jonas nods. They’ve discussed this before. How as a child Elizabeth had met the mysterious priest who had been roaming their town in that fateful autumn of 2019.

“She said that when I left her, the last words I said were… _I’ll keep my promise. I’ll bring her back to you_.”

“Right,” said Jonas. He’s heard this bit before too. “Only your older self never explained to Elizabeth who it is you’re supposed to be bringing back to her.”

Noah lifts his mug of wine, knocking back the last gulp. His eyes are hazy as he stares down at the white wooden army before him. Since they started playing chess, Noah has always purposefully seated himself on the white side of the board.

“What if it’s her sister?” Noah suggests. “Franziska?”

“I thought it'd be Elizabeth’s mother,” says Jonas. “Isn't that why he passed on that pocket watch?”

Noah shakes his head. “I…I don’t know her mother though.”

“Well, you didn’t know Franziska either.”

Jonas’s eyes are focused on the board. He’s just about to move his rook into check when he raises his eyes to Noah again, feeling a sudden tension in his silence. Noah sucks in a shuddering breath before he speaks again.

“I did,” he says. “I knew her sister. I knew Franziska.”

The rook topples from Jonas’s fingers as Noah spills out his story. How he knew a woman named Franziska Doppler back in the 1920s. How she had been one of the founding members of Sic Mundus. How Adam had rescued her from the apocalypse along with two other teenagers from Jonas’s time, travelling with them all the way back to 1888. Those other teenagers being Magnus Nielson and Bartosz Tiedemann.

Jonas sits blinking at Noah, his jaw hanging slack.

“They survived? They all survived, and you never told us?”

Jonas is struggling to catch his breath, his heart racing. He’s elated to learn that three of his friends didn’t die in the blast from the power plant, but feels sick finding out that they all became members of Adam’s cult. That they’re part of this madness too.

“Why…why did you never tell us?” he gasps out.

Noah’s eyes are brimming with tears. “I wanted to,” he says, sounding painfully sincere. “But I’ve been waiting. I have been waiting because Adam said that he and Magnus and Franziska would be travelling to the future too. I was sent ahead, but he told me when the passage opens and the prophecy comes true, they will be here too.” He swallows. “So many times, I’ve wanted to tell Elizabeth that she will see her sister again. But Adam never told me when. I don’t want to get her hopes up in case something goes wrong. Or…or in case, we are waiting for them a long time.” He winces, bowing his head. “I thought they would be here by now.”

Jonas hasn’t seen Noah like this before, his eyes fogged with doubts and his faith in Adam seeming shaken. He finds himself feeling pity for him. He’s thinking for the first time that Noah might just be a lowly pawn in Adam’s great quantum chess game.

Then he shudders, another thought occurring to him.

“What about Bartosz? What happened to…”

Then in a rush, all the pieces fall into place. A chill spreads over Jonas’s skin, much like the one that had seized him on the night he read his father’s suicide note. Because he realizes he already knows what happened to his old friend, Bartosz. He remembers the stoned talk he and Noah had shared in the old Tiedemann house. How Noah had said that Bartosz had been the name of his father.

His father who Noah said had died not long before he traveled.

“He’s dead, isn’t he?” A sweat breaks out on his brow. “And you’re his…?”

“His son,” Noah finishes for him. He sighs like a huge weigh has been lifted off him. Like he is a penitent man stepping out of the confessional booth. “You don’t know how long I’ve wanted to tell you.” He reaches up and wipes both his tears and the smear of Elizabeth’s lipstick from his cheeks. “I…I didn’t know what to give you for Christmas this year. I thought it was time I gave you the truth.”

Jonas is crying too now. He thought he had come to terms with all his friends being dead. Now he feels like Bartosz died only moments ago. And even though they had parted on bad terms, it’s still a punch to Jonas’s gut. He supposes he should be pleased that Bartosz lived a longer life than he had thought. But no, this still hurts. It still stings like loss.

“How…how did he die?” He swallows. “Do I even want to know?”

Noah’s stare hardens. He slowly shakes his head.


	7. Nice Day for a Dark Wedding

Martha sits beside the lake, staring out over its pure blue water.

Jonas approaches her slowly, his heart in his throat. She’s wearing a white dress that seems to glow under the blazing sun, radiating angelic light. Her long dark hair covers her back like a spill of ink. She must sense him coming, because without looking over her shoulder, she rises from the sand and begins to turn. Jonas’s eyes flick from her face to her hands. There’s a red thread coiled around her fingers, like a cat’s cradle. Her Ariadne thread from the school play. Jonas reaches for her hands as he steps closer and Martha reaches back for him, hooking her yarn over his fingers, tangling them in its loops.

“I’m having déjà vu again,” Martha says with a light laugh. “I like it when you meet me here. The place where we first kissed. Or at least…for me it was the first time.”

He nods. “I thought it would be the last time I ever saw you.”

Jonas still wishes their moment by the lake had been the end of things between him and her. He wishes he could have left Martha warm, flushing and alive on that beautiful June day. Left her with a final kiss and those words he’d been longing to say.

“You look different again,” Martha says, tilting her head. “Older. Tired.”

He swallows, aware of how rough and calloused his hands feel against her smooth milky skin. Unless Jonas finds some way to change things, then Martha will never get to grow old. And even if he succeeds, they will never be young together again.

“It’s been thirteen years now...” he says haltingly. “Thirteen summers since I lost you. Since he killed you. And I’m still trying to keep my promise, Martha. I still want to make things right. Claudia, Noah and me, we’re still working on the God Particle. I’m still trying to find a way to travel back. So I can save you this time.”

She smiles tenderly, curling her thread tighter around his fingers.

“But Jonas, even if you make things right, you and I will still be wrong.”

He squeezes her hands, his grip tensing against the taut red string.

“We are perfect for each other. Never believe anything else.”

She holds his stare and their faces move closer. Before they can kiss, Martha’s body jerks as if something has hit her. Her smile falls and her face pales. Jonas looks down to see their hands are no longer knotted with red thread. They are covered in blood. Blood that is gushing from a bullet wound in the middle of Martha’s torso, a stain spreading fast over her white dress. He lifts his head to see the blood trickling from the sides of her lips too. Those lips he will never kiss again. And then Martha is falling. She’s falling back and beyond his reach and Jonas is lunging forward, trying to catch her…trying to hold on…

He sits bolt upright, gasping for breath. He’s in a cold sweat, his heartbeat racing out of control. Jonas shuts his eyes again, wishing he could swallow down one of his old pills. He blinks and squints as his vision slowly adjusts to the waking world. He is lying sprawled in the grey sand on the same bank from his dream. He came to this spot – his and Martha’s spot – late last night. He must have fallen asleep here with memories of 2019 heavy on his mind. The lake before him looks very different now, its dirty green waters more of a contaminated swamp. Nobody comes here to swim anymore, though shockingly there are fish and frogs managing to survive in its murky depths. They make you nauseous if you eat them, but these days Jonas finds a little food poisoning is preferable to starving.

Jonas knows nothing in this post-apocalyptic hellhole can kill him. By rights, his body should be riddled with tumors and heart disease by now. But instead he is fitter than he’s ever been before in his life, his chest and arms hardened with wiry muscles. It’s down to all the labor he has been doing these last few years. Him and Noah both. They are pretty much their own freelance handyman business, paying visits to their fellow Winden survivors and helping to repair and fortify their shelters, sometimes building them a new home from scratch. People trade them food, clean water and other supplies for their services. It’s far more profitable employment than his nuclear physicist job at the old power plant.

Thinking of Noah, Jonas suddenly remembers what day it is. He starts and stumbles to his feet, shaking the sand out of his clothes and scratching the dirt from his beard. He’d promised to meet Noah at the old St Christopher Church by daybreak. The sun is hidden behind the swollen grey clouds, but Jonas can tell from the muggy heat it’s already mid-morning. He sets off in brisk strides.

Once he’s on the road, Jonas soon finds he is walking alongside other travelers making their way to the church. Word of what’s happening there today must have spread around. Jonas is not really surprised that there are so many people who want to attend. Noah is practically the mayor of their little ragtag township at this point. Over the past few years, Noah has recruited more than just Elizabeth into the cult of Sic Mundus. He has a whole faithful flock who’ll gather in the caves at least once every week to hear him give sermons about his paradise. About the prophecy and the passage that will reopen one day, leading them all to freedom and salvation. People crowd in and listen spellbound as Noah speaks and Elizabeth signs at his side. They feed off his beautiful lies and are nourished enough to keep going.

But they are not coming to the church today for one of Noah's regular services. There’s something different happening here. Something personal that Jonas swore to Noah he would be a part of. When Jonas hurries into the church ruins, he finds that Noah is standing at what remains of the altar. A shaft of light shines through the gaping hole in the roof, illuminating his frowning face.

“You’re late,” he mutters as Jonas arrives panting at his side.

Noah looks him up and down, his nose scrunching with disapproval. Because Jonas is just as scruffy, grubby, and unkempt as he is any other day of living after the apocalypse. Noah has made the effort to shave and put on an ill-fitting suit, scavenged from some dead stranger’s wardrobe. He has wet down his hair and combed it back neatly from his brow. Jonas just shrugs off his raincoat and smooths a hand over the ragged shirt underneath. He never promised Noah that he would dress up for this occasion. Only that he’d be here.

And besides, it was Noah who had insisted on Jonas being his Best Man.

“I’m sorry,” Jonas murmurs back. “I overslept.”

Noah just shakes his head at him, his cheeks flushed with irritation.

“I thought you understood how important this day is to me. How significant this date is for all of us.”

Noah nods to the people who have already begun taking their seats in the pews behind them. The Sic Mundus faithful who have come to see their two beloved leaders joined in marriage. Only most of those filling the church haven’t even known Noah and Elizabeth for longer than a couple of years. Most of them are part of the wave of new arrivals that have broken through the military barricades that have long encircled their borders and come to live with them here in this lonely little ghost town. The journey to Winden has become a pilgrimage of sorts for daredevil fanatical types who are searching for answers in the place thought to have brought about the global catastrophe that the world never recovered from.

These travelers have come here from all around Europe, Russia, North Africa and the Middle East, some of them traveling by foot, others parachuting in from the air. They have brought with them not only a wide collection of languages and accents but are also far more equipped for survival. They have brought the means to grow their own food, establishing mushroom crops in the caves that are sprouting in its shadows all year round. They’ve come here for the long haul, convinced that this epicenter of the planet’s doomsday is the place they are meant to be at the end of time. And of course, Noah immediately reeled them in with his stories of a magical time tunnel that would take them all to paradise.

“I’m here now, aren’t I?” Jonas snaps back, refusing to apologize. “This day has its significance for me too. You know that.”

Noah winces and says nothing more. The other thing that the pilgrims had brought back to Winden was clocks and calendars. They knew the date again. Today’s date being June 27th, 2033. The thirteen year anniversary of the shock-wave from the power plant and everything that had followed it. For Noah, it was also the first day he had met Elizabeth, taking shelter with her in the Doppler bunker. It was the first time he had set eyes on the young girl who would grow into the woman who he's about to take as his wife.

Yes, Jonas can see why they wanted to marry on this day. But for him, this date marks the last time that he had seen Martha alive. He wants to be happy for Noah and Elizabeth and the love they have found for each other. But it’s hard when his mind keeps suffering traumatic flashbacks of his own first love bleeding out on his kitchen floor. And he can’t help remembering that Noah is still a part of Adam’s plot, yet now they call one another friends. Is he betraying Martha's memory every day he is Noah's friend?

His thoughts are interrupted as an Asian woman rises from the front row and begins to play a wedding march on her battered violin. All heads turn to the crumbling church doors where Elizabeth is entering, clutching hold of Claudia’s arm. With nobody from her own family alive or here to give her away, Claudia is the closest thing to a parent figure that the Doppler girl has left. And despite how often Claudia reminds them all that she isn’t their mother, she wouldn’t let Elizabeth walk down the aisle alone.

Jonas’s heart melts a little as he stares at Elizabeth in her bridal gown. The dress that she’s hand-stitched herself from dozens of scraps of white, off-white or once-white pieces of fabric that she’s collected and squirreled away over the years. There are fragments of bed-sheets and dish cloths in her trailing patchwork skirts. Her veil has been fashioned from an old shower curtain. She has managed to turn these scraps into something beautiful. And Jonas hopes that she can be happy today. While he still has nightmares about Elizabeth’s older self sometimes, the younger girl has become like a little sister to him. Elizabeth is twenty-two and too thin and traumatized beyond what any person should have to endure. But as she lets go of Claudia’s arm and clasps hands with Noah, she is smiling.

An elderly Italian priest steps forward and begins to deliver the ceremony. Noah is no Christian and he often takes pains to remind Jonas that while Sic Mundus may wear the trappings of a religion, he does not believe in God and the only deity he recognizes is time itself. That being said, Noah knows he will eventually travel to the past and disguise himself as a priest. So he has been making friends with men of the cloth and learning how to pastor. Like a good method actor, he wants to slip inside the skin of his future role. He may not follow the same doctrine, but he still seems to respect the old holy man who is joining him and Elizabeth in this little ritual of matrimony.

Jonas fulfills his Best Man duties by handing over a pair of rusty rings. Then he joins Claudia at the rearmost benches of the tumbledown church. They've both done their part and they’ve already warned the bride and groom that they won’t be giving any speeches. From this point on Jonas and Claudia will just be the peanut gallery of this end of the world wedding. Like any family with conflicting belief systems, they've learned to wear neutral expressions and say nothing when they are forced to be around the cult crowd. 

Noah begins to speak and sign his vows as Jonas leans over and whispers to Claudia –

“So why was it that you never got married?” he asks.

She shrugs. “I never found any man I could stand to be around for so many years.”

He nudges her teasingly in her side. “Except for me?”

Claudia raises an eyebrow. “Yes. I’ve all the time in the world for you, Jonas Kahnwald.”

Jonas glances at her and they share a smile. It’s a relief that he still has a friend. A fellow Sic Mundus atheist.

Jonas had moved back into the bunker with Claudia a couple of years ago, when it was becoming blatantly clear that Noah and Elizabeth were desiring some alone time in the shack. Seeing the two of them at the altar now, Jonas is worrying that another friendship is slipping away from him. He fears that he is losing Noah not only to marriage, but to these sycophantic followers he is amassing around him. And Jonas never thought there would come a time that he'd miss Noah and wish things could've stayed just as they were.

“I'd only just gotten used to him,” Jonas murmurs. “Now everything is going to change...”


	8. Godfathers of the Future

As soon as Jonas hears the news, he rushes to the hospital.

There are about a dozen dead-eyed cultists sitting or pacing around the waiting room. The hospital has become one of Sic Mundus’s bases in the last few years. They’ve cleared away the wreckage, rebuilt its fallen walls and salvaged its medical equipment. It’s become a place where they treat those in their tribe who are wounded or sick, or where they bring the dying to heave their last breaths in one of its mouldering beds. In the few times that Jonas himself has visited here he’s been used to hearing screams in its halls.

Now all is quiet, except for the sound of a baby crying behind a closed door.

Jonas’s heart flutters wildly in his chest, like a bird is beating its wings against his ribs. He had heard about the birth when he visited the caves to trade some of his catch for mushrooms and herbs. Noah and Elizabeth had gone out there a few days earlier to give one of their sermons to their growing group of converts. They had not been back to the cabin since, but that was nothing unusual. The two of them were now in the habit of living only parttime in the woods near the bunker, then spending odd weeks camping out in the cavern closest to their precious passage. Jonas hadn’t considered that the baby might have come. Elizabeth wasn’t supposed to be due for at least another month.

As Jonas heads towards the door, one of the largest members of the Sic Mundus group rises from his seat and stands in his path, blocking his way. The man crosses his hairy forearms and he scowls down at Jonas, treating him like an intruder in their midst, like a heathen in their temple. And Jonas can’t help shuddering and stepping back a pace. Because he knows this man. He can’t recall his name, but he remembers he was one of Elizabeth’s army in the 2050s. He will look just as burly and intimidating in a dozen years’ time, only with deeper lines in his face. This particular man is one of those who’ll build the gallows and string up the noose that Elizabeth will use to hang his younger self. Jonas glances around, wondering how many others in this waiting room will be in that future execution crowd.

Jonas considers turning around and hurrying back to the bunker to tell Claudia about the baby. Then just waiting till Elizabeth and her child come back to the cabin. But instead he stands his ground, staring passed this self-appointed guardsman.

“Noah…” Jonas calls out, careful to keep his voice even.

“Let him through,” Noah immediately calls back.

The man at the door scowls, but he still reluctantly steps aside. None of the cultists like Jonas but they know he is under the protection of their beloved leaders. So they can’t chase him down and beat him like they do to the other faithless survivors who are still roaming around Winden. Noah hasn’t told his followers why Jonas is special. He hasn’t said that Jonas will become the legendary Adam from their prophecy, the saviour who will lead them to their paradise. Noah has tried coaxing Jonas to reveal his identity at one of their Sic Mundus services. But Jonas insists he’ll have nothing to do with it, that he'll never be Adam, and Noah hasn’t pushed the matter.

The door creaks as Jonas steps into the hospital room. Elizabeth is sitting up in bed, her long hair stuck to her face in sweaty strands. She’s cradling her baby in her arms. Jonas can just about see its red face poking out of its swaddling blankets. The little bundle is scarcely any bigger than the hands that are holding it, but it’s still very much alive, its cries just beginning to soften. Noah sits in a chair beside their bed and as Jonas approaches, he raises a finger to his lips. For a moment, Jonas is shaken by déjà vu, and he's tempted to glance over his shoulder to make sure that there's not a man hiding behind the door waiting to chloroform him. Noah is looking more and more like the mysterious priest who locked him in a bunker in the 80s. He wonders how much longer it’ll be before they travel again.

Right now, it doesn’t seem like Noah wants to be anywhere but here.

“She arrived yesterday morning,” he whispers, pressing a hand to his wife’s shoulder as she turns to read his lips. “We have named her Charlotte…after Elizabeth’s mother.” He stares down at his new-born daughter with eyes that are weary and bloodshot. “Our doctors didn’t give her much of a chance at first. Because she’s come so early and looks so small. But she’s strong this one. She wants to live…even in this world.”

Jonas swallows and nods, unsure of what to say. He’s trying to be happy for them. He knows how long they have wanted this. This had been Elizabeth’s third pregnancy. Her first she had miscarried after only a month. Her second had emerged stillborn. It would’ve been their son if he’d lived to take his first breath. After that blow, it’d been a while before they’d tried again. Jonas wants to believe this will be the child that survives. But in the time and place they are living, most pregnancies don’t make it to term, and those few babies that do live through labour emerge with health defects or mutations. Most of them turn blue by their first winter. If baby Charlotte does live to leave this hospital room, then she’ll be seen as a miracle, and the Sic Mundus flock will view their little family as even more sacred.

“Get some rest,” Noah speaks and signs to his wife. “Jonas and I will watch over her.”

Elizabeth is reluctant to let Charlotte go at first. But as Noah gently lifts her in his own arms, she sinks back into the pillows, her eyes drooping closed, her whole body seeming sapped. Noah nods for Jonas to come sit with him on the chairs against the opposite wall. The wall where a painting of the Emerald Tablet hangs. Jonas remembers that this picture used to be displayed in one of the corridors, but it looks to have been moved into their room as some sort of holy relic intended to bless the child born within its confines.

“I’m worried,” Noah confesses as they sit down together. “This baby, our little girl…she’s not part of the plan. Or, at least…Adam never told me about her, only that I must protect Elizabeth. My older self, he never said we would become a father either.” He looks up at Jonas in confusion. “Why didn’t they tell me?”

Jonas sighs. “It’s like I’ve always said. You can’t trust them.”

“Should I trust you instead?” Noah is still eyeing him, warily. “Adam always said that our friendship in this time wouldn’t last. That one day you would betray me.”

Jonas rolls his eyes, sick of hearing this. “We’ve known each other twenty years now. If I wanted to stab you in the back, why would I have waited this long?”

Noah shifts uncomfortably in his seat. “I don’t know. Times change. People change. I keep telling you that you shouldn’t trust Claudia as much as you do. Where is she anyway? Is she over at the power plant, working on the God Particle again?”

“Where else,” Jonas mutters, not wanting to listen to more of Noah’s conspiracy theories about Claudia and where she goes when she disappears for days at a time, or what she knows that she’s not telling them, or whether she might be deliberately sabotaging their work on the time portal. “She thinks that she’s close to stabilizing it.”

“And you believe her,” Noah snorts, as if Jonas is the one with too much blind faith around here.

“If Claudia can get the portal working,” Jonas persists, “…then you should take Elizabeth and the baby and travel with them. Whatever time you land in, it has to be better than here. You should find somewhere quiet and bring up your daughter in peace. That might not be what your older self did. But you don’t have to follow his path this time. You can still change. When I travel back to 2019, I’m going to change everything.”

Jonas feels a pinch of envy for Noah. For this chance he has to escape all of this. To go and raise a family with the girl he loves. Jonas knows in his tired broken heart that he will never love again, and he’ll never have kids. Given that his own birth was a paradox and the success of his mission will surely result in him being erased from existence, Jonas knows he can’t father any children. They’d just be wiped out along with him.

Noah seems to consider Jonas’s suggestion of fleeing with his family, using the time portal to take them somewhere safe. But he quickly shakes his head.

“No, we have to stay here for now,” he insists. “I’ll know when it’s the right time to travel again. Adam will come himself or he’ll send me a sign.” He nods to himself, seeming resolved. “We don’t need the God Particle. The passage will open.”

“And it will magic you all away to paradise, will it?” Jonas shakes his head at him. “I don’t understand you. I don’t see how you can believe in something so strongly when you’ve never seen any proof of its existence.”

“And I don’t know how you can disbelieve something so strongly when you _have_ seen proof.” Noah looks Jonas hard in the eye. “You have seen Adam. You’ve spoken to him and slept in his chambers. He’s shown you the scar you share. You know him to be real and yet you constantly tell me you won’t become him.”

“I…I have to believe it...” he stammers, his voice shaking. “I’d go mad if I didn’t believe that.”

Sometimes Jonas wonders if him going mad is exactly how Adam happens.

Noah just nods. “You’re not the only one who needs to believe for that reason.”

A silence settles between them and their stares fall back to the baby cradled in Noah’s arms. Her blue eyes are open and blinking up at them both. It’s like she’s searching for clues about who they are in the faces their making and the words she can’t yet understand. At some point while they’ve been talking, she’s wriggled one arm outside her blanket. Noah reaches down to tuck it back inside her swaddle. But before he can, his baby girl reaches up and grasps a hold of his finger, clinging like she doesn’t ever want to let go.

Noah laughs and looks up at Jonas, tears filling his eyes.

“There’s a little bit of paradise right here in this room.”


	9. All the Suffering in the World

Jonas hunches forward, gripping the rusted bars of the cage.

Sweat drips from his brow, trickling down his neck, soaking his torn t-shirt. He hisses every time it trails over one of the raised welts on his back. He stretches a trembling hand over his shoulder, tentatively trying to wipe some of the sweat away so he doesn’t have to feel its salty sting. His palm comes back smeared with blood. He swallows, knowing he needs to get his wounds bandaged before they become infected. Maybe it’s too late for that? His skin already feels hot to touch. His head is pounding, his breathing ragged.

Just like the last time Elizabeth left him bleeding and feverish in one of these cages.

Jonas isn’t sure how long he’s been a prisoner. It’s hard to hold onto any sense of time in the shadows of the caves. For the last few hours, he has been squirming, his joints seizing up in these tight confines. Sic Mundus took these kennels from the animal shelter and re-appropriated them as holding cells for rule breakers. People don’t usually stay locked up in them for long. Only the time it takes for Noah, Elizabeth and their top henchmen to review the evidence and confirm their guilt. For murder or rape, the penalty will be death by hanging, the culprit’s bodies left dangling from trees or gibbets as a warning to others. For the lesser crime of stealing, the thief will be flogged, but then allowed to go free.

This is the first time someone has stolen a baby.

After Noah had stormed out of the bunker, Jonas had been awake and pacing through the night, wondering if he should go out and help with the search. But given Noah’s fury and accusations he thought that it might be better to stay away, wait until tempers had cooled and just hope that the infant was found before morning. But at dawn, the Sic Mundus mob had come for him, dragging him out of his shelter. Like Noah, they had judged that Jonas was at the very least an accomplice in the kidnapping of their miracle baby. So they had taken him to the barren ground that lay before what they called the 'Dead Zone', the place where they inflicted their medieval forms of punishment. And apparently it wasn’t enough that Jonas’s back had been lashed to bloody ribbons for a crime he didn’t commit. Once they had untied him from the whipping post, Elizabeth signed the order for him to be taken to the cave and shut in a cage, his suffering still not at an end.

The fierce white ray of an orb light streams into the cavern. Elizabeth rounds the tunnel’s bend and sets her torch down on a nearby boulder. As his eyes adjust, Jonas sees that Elizabeth’s long flaxen hair is gone. The messy clumps that are left on her scalp make Jonas think she must have hacked it off in a fit of grief. Elizabeth is suddenly looking a lot like the fanatical warrior woman that he met in the 2050s. She has come to him alone, but she’s carrying a hunting rifle on a strap around her shoulder.

 _Are you ready to talk?_ she signs, staring daggers at him.

“There is nothing I can say!” The cage is too small for him to sign, so he just raises his voice and trusts she can lipread. “I don’t know where your daughter is! I was down in the bunker. I didn’t see a thing! I don’t know what Noah told you, but I…”

 _Noah always said you would betray him_ , she signs over his shouts.

His fingers tighten around the bars. He shakes them in frustration.

“I’m the one who’s been betrayed!” he yells. “I was your friend! I swore to Noah that I didn’t know what happened to Charlotte! But he still sent that pack of rabid dogs you call followers after me. And now what? Are you just going to leave me to rot in this cage? Does Noah think that punishing me will somehow bring your child back?!”

Elizabeth just stares at him, her eyes wide, her breath coming in harsh burst through her nostrils. And Jonas knows this is the stare of a girl who beat a man’s brains out when she was just nine years old. The stare of a girl who has already lost far too much. A girl who will turn savage and vengeful if she has to lose anything more.

 _I don’t know what Noah thinks_ , she signs, her chin trembling. _He’s not here anymore._

Jonas frowns. “What do you mean Noah’s not here?”

_Last night he promised me that he would bring her back. Then he left the cabin and went out into the woods. When he hadn’t come back in the morning, we tracked his footprints to the power plant. That’s where the trail stops. It stops by those machines and the dark matter. One of those yellow suits is missing. And he is gone. He…_

Her hands are shaking so bad she has to plant them on her hips. She takes a long shuddering breath, battling with herself not to cry in front of him. Elizabeth is in a greater world of pain than Jonas had realized. Her child and her husband had vanished in the same night.

“He must have got the portal working,” Jonas says, slow and clear in his mouth movements. “The God Particle. Noah must have stabilized it. He must have travelled.”

 _That thing is not a part of God_ , she signs back. _It’s the Devil. It’s taken everything!_

Elizabeth’s mouth stretches into a silent scream. She clasps her hands around her rifle and hoists it upright, aiming it at Jonas. He doesn’t flinch. If Elizabeth wants to try shooting him like a rat in a trap, she can go ahead. He knows the gun will most likely jam. He also knows that members of Sic Mundus are taught not to waste bullets on giving any rule-breakers a swift merciful death. Jonas knows a quick shot in the heart is more than he can hope for.

“Time travel took everything from me too,” he reminds her, refusing to cower.

Elizabeth snarls and slams the butt of her rifle against the bars, bruising his fingers. Jonas cries out, jerking his hands back and cradling them against his chest.

“What do you want from me?!” he screams, his voice hoarse and cracking.

 _I want the truth!_ she signs furiously. _I want to know who took her!_

“It wasn’t me!” he insists. “How many times do I have to…?”

Her face hardens. _Was it Claudia then? Are you covering for her?_

“Claudia would never do that to you. Leave her alone.”

Jonas is thankful Elizabeth can’t hear the desperation in his voice. He doesn’t know where Claudia has been these last few days. And yes, he knows she probably keeps her share of secrets from him. But Jonas still trusts her. He doesn’t believe she has anything to do with Charlotte’s abduction. And besides, Claudia is all he has left. He’s not going to let those thugs with their bullwhips go after a grey-haired woman in her sixties.

Elizabeth just stares at him, tears sliding down her cheeks.

_You know who took my baby. I can read it in your face._

Jonas shudders, remembering that Elizabeth always sees more in people’s faces than what they say. No matter what is on his lips, his eyes must have given him away. Because in the long hours he has been left stewing in this cage, Jonas has made his mind up who’s stolen Charlotte. There’s only one person who he thinks would do this.

“I…I think it might have been Adam,” he confesses to her.

 _Adam is you_ , Elizabeth signs, her eyes burning with rage.

“Not yet. Not if I can help it.” He swallows, daring to press his face close to the bars. “This is what Adam does. He takes away the people you love in order to break you. This is why I’ve always warned you not to put your faith in him. Not to believe in his paradise.”

Her hands go still, her eyes falling to the cave floor.

 _What else do I have left?_ she signs at last.

Jonas winces, slumping against the side of the cage. Any hope he might have had that little Elizabeth Doppler would not turn into that murderous madwoman in the future is slipping away fast. She turns her back on him for a moment, staring up at the cave walls. Then slowly she turns around, seeming to have come to some decision.

_I will tell the others it was the army that took our child._

Jonas squints. “Why would you tell them that?”

Elizabeth narrows her eyes, seeming frustrated that she has to spell it out for him. _If I tell them it was you, or Claudia, they will kill you. And if I tell them that it was Adam, they might start questioning our faith._

He shakes his head. “You could start a war.”

She shrugs, not caring anymore. _Maybe a war is what they need? Those soldiers at the borders of our town are scavengers just like we are. We have the strength in numbers to attack their bases. We could take their tanks, their guns and ammunition..._

“I don’t want any part in that,” Jonas tells her in disgust.

 _I’m not asking you to be part of it!_ Elizabeth punctuates her last sign by smashing the lock off his cage and then wrenching its door open. _You are no longer welcome in our group. You and Claudia are banished from these caves. You keep to the bunker and the power plant and you stay out of our way. I don’t want either of you dead. But I do want you gone._

Jonas says nothing as he steps down from the kennel. He doesn’t bother to say that he would never want to come back. He doesn’t want to stick around to watch what Elizabeth is turning into. He just lets her lead him through the tunnels at gunpoint. As they pass through the camp in the main chamber, several of the Sic Mundus followers rise to their feet, looking prepared to rip Jonas apart with their teeth if their leader gave the order. But Elizabeth just raises a warning hand to keep them at bay, while Jonas struggles to hold his head up and keep his spine straight with the crippling pain in his back. Elizabeth leads him all the way to the cavemouth and he carries on walking into the woods, not looking back.

Jonas walks in a trance through the darkened forest. It looks like they kept him in the cage for the full day. Now he is not only whipped and wounded, but sick with dehydration. His head is spinning, and he’s lost all sense of direction. He walks swaying and stumbling, trying to find his way back to his shelter. More than once he collapses and considers laying down to sleep on his stomach in the dead leaves. But every time he gets back to his feet and keeps moving, desperate to put more distance between himself and those caves.

Somehow Jonas ends up in the cemetery. He doesn’t know what force has steered him here, but it’s a landscape that suits his despairing mood. Its crosses and tombstones blur together in his teary vision. Its graves cover the ground at his feet like a garden of scars. What’s buried beneath their soil still hurts worse than the broken skin on Jonas’s back. He begins to wheeze and hugs an arm around his surely bruised ribs. He finally sinks to his knees before a familiar black stone bearing the name of ‘Michael Kahnwald’.

There’s a familiar man standing beside it, covered in black cesium.

“Jonas,” his father whispers, extending a hand to him.

“Papa,” he whimpers, reaching for him too. “Papa, help me…”

“I wish I could,” he says, voice straining. “I wish it more than anything.”

Their fingers hang in the air, not quite touching, unable to close the space between them. Jonas remembers that they can’t hold each other anymore and he lets his arm drop.

“Why is this happening to me?” he asks, feeling like a scared child again.

“God has a plan,” his father insists. “Your part in this is bigger than you know.”

Jonas shakes his head, not wanting to hear this now. Not from his dad.

“There is no God,” he hisses. “There is only time. And I just want it to end.”

He shuts his eyes and bites down on his lip, realizing that this sounds a lot like something Adam might say. He shakes himself, trying to throw off the clutches of his future self, the one he has always sworn he would never become. When he blinks his eyes open, Jonas finds that his father has vanished, like the dice in one of his old Mikkel Nielson magic tricks.

“Papa,” Jonas calls out, not wanting to be left alone. “Papa!”

Then suddenly there’s another voice crying out in the graveyard.

“Mama!” it cries. A child’s voice; lost and alone. “Mama!”

Jonas wonders for a moment if he’s imagining it. Then he gulps down a breath and staggers to his feet, following the sound of these echoing wails. Through the mist and shadow, he can just about make out the silhouette of a little girl, standing among the crosses, sobbing for her mother till her throat is raw. Judging by her size, she must be five or six years old. When Jonas crouches before her, the child throws herself against his chest, coiling her arms around his neck, seeming to instinctively see him as her saviour.

“I want my Mama,” she sniffles in his ear.

A chill sensation prickles over Jonas’s skin. The little girl in his arms smells clean. There’s strawberry scented shampoo in her hair. The child is not from this time. She is a traveller. And right away Jonas has an idea of who has brought her here. He looks around for Noah, wondering why he isn’t with this girl who he assumes must be his daughter. A Charlotte who’s grown older in the time it has taken her father to find her again.

“Mama! Mama!” the girl starts to moan again.

“Okay,” Jonas mutters. “Just hold on.”

His back is still in agony, and his senses are still scrambled. But this new purpose gives Jonas a fresh reserve of strength. He scoops the little girl up in his arms, carrying her against his chest and making his way back to the caves. The caves that he had just left for what he had intended to be the last time, in the apocalypse years at least. Now he is rushing back through the forest, he is hurrying back up to its entrance and he is calling out Elizabeth’s name, yelling for her to come quick. To come see.

Elizabeth can’t hear him, of course. A handful of her followers come marching out of the cave instead, carrying clubs and axes. They lower their weapons when they see the child that Jonas is holding. Then suddenly Elizabeth is running out of the shadows between them, the orb light in her hand as she hurries over to Jonas, her arms already reaching. Jonas is briefly dazzled by her torchlight as Elizabeth wastes no time in plucking the trembling child out of his arms. The girl seems reluctant to let go of him for a moment. But the next second, she’s transferred her tight monkey hold over to Elizabeth. During the exchange, the orb is dropped on the ground. Jonas snatches it up, needing it to light his way back to the bunker. Elizabeth doesn’t stop him taking it. She is staring at him with a look of remorse, maybe even a little wonder. Jonas just gives her a curt nod. He knew he had to bring the girl to her, but he still never wants to see her again.

Then before Jonas turns to leave, he catches his first clear look at the child’s face in the torchlight, her cheek pressed against Elizabeth’s brow. His heart clenches at the sight of a familiar scar that runs slanted across her face. Elizabeth is already carrying the girl away as in a terrible flash Jonas realizes. He knows who this child is that he's just delivered into Sic Mundus’s care.

_Silja._


	10. The Long Road Home

Eleven more years pass before he travels again.

Jonas knows it has to happen. He knows the God Particle will work some long awaited day. He’s seen it stabilized in a time when his future self isn’t around. _His future self_. For so long he's thought of that ragged stranger who sat beside him in the graveyard, who held him back at the hospital, who left him locked up inside the bunker, as a different person. He used to see him as a troubling dream of the man he might grow into, if not the outright nightmare of becoming Adam. Three decades later and Jonas still feels the way he did as a teenager, still wants the same things, is still driven by the same desperate hopes. But when he peers into the cracked mirror on the bunker wall, it’s the stranger who stares back.

Like his father before him, Jonas has become a recluse in his forties. He leaves the bunker as little as possible, only venturing outdoors to fish, forage and collect water for purifying. The days that he and Claudia work at the old nuclear power plant have become more scattered and scarce. They are too tired to go through the same endless experiments on a regular basis. They give themselves more days off, more time to rest and reflect. In their shelter, the two of them can spend many hours occupying the same space without saying a word to each other. They give one another the peace of shared silences and they lose themselves in books.

Jonas was never much of a reader when he was a kid. He never got very good grades in his literature class. Partly because he sat next to Bartosz who would make fun of the texts they studied and crack jokes when smarter kids like Franziska made their presentations. Jonas knew Martha liked to read though. It was something she had been shy about, not wanting to be branded a nerd. It made Jonas want to be a secret reader too. He had a big collection of books on his home shelves, books on science and magic that'd been left there by his father from the time it'd been his childhood bedroom. Jonas had always meant to get around to them. But with his 21st century teenage brain all overloaded on screen time, social media and video games, it was never something that he could concentrate on. Until now that is. Reading has become Jonas’s refuge in this last lonely stretch of his apocalypse years. Claudia calls him a late in life bookworm. He’s grateful she thought to steal such a wide range from the library before other looters got to it, even if in their early years together, Jonas rarely picked any of them up.

The only thing Jonas used to read back then was H.G. Tannhaus’s book, _A Journey Through Time_ , over and over, giving himself headaches in the struggle to understand it, taking notes so he could ask Claudia to better explain it to him. He still doesn’t feel like he fully comprehends it, though he’s looking forward to discussing his theories with Tannhaus in person. But in more recent years, it is literature, philosophy, and theology that he prefers to escape into. He finds solace in the existential worlds of Kafka, in Schopenhauer’s writings on metaphysical will, in Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. He might be turning into an intellectual. His brain is changing shape as much as his body over time.

Jonas remembers listening to Adam’s rambling speeches as a teenager. How his elderly self had spoken about the human condition and their place in the universe and how Jonas could not believe those high-minded words would ever come out of his mouth. Now with all the books that he’s consuming, these are the very thoughts that keep him awake at night. That have him spacing out during the day. Right now, he’s alone in the bunker, feeling his mind spiraling again, when he hears footfalls on the stairs.

“I’ve done it,” says a voice from the doorway.

Jonas sits up on his mattress, letting his current book fall against his stomach. He looks up to see Claudia descending the steps into the bunker. She has her semi-automatic rifle slung over her chest, the one that she stole off the corpse of some Sic Mundus cultist who she found dead in the forest, most likely taken out by one of the military drones.

“What?” asks Jonas, casually scratching at his chin.

“I’ve got it working,” she says in a perfectly calm and neutral tone. “The portal. The God Particle. I went over to the power plant and got it to stabilize this morning. We can travel again.”

Jonas stares at her blinking and dumbfounded. For years he’s tried to imagine how he and Claudia would feel in this moment. After so many decades and so much work and toil, they have finally reinvented a means of time travel. He’d thought there might be tears, whoops and celebrating over their momentous hard-won accomplishment.

Instead they just hold each other’s stares and share a solemn nod.

“I’ll start packing then,” says Jonas, rising to his feet.

He hugs his book, a hefty hardback collection of world-famous artworks, to his chest. Jonas hasn’t been able to focus on reading this morning. He has just been staring at these paintings, slowly absorbing every page before turning to the next. Looking at art helps him to stay calm when his anxiety bites. He doesn’t want to put it down. He’s scared of the journey ahead, fearful of traveling again after so long. He wishes that he could take all of his favourite books along with him. He has so many of them. And even though he’s read them all a dozen times over, he still hates the thought of leaving any of them behind. They have become like friends to him.

With a sigh, Jonas forces himself to rise and pull on his boots. The first things he stows in his rucksack are his orb torch, his Geiger counter and the crinkled browning pages of his father’s suicide note. He’s been keeping all three of them on the shelf by his bed, knowing he’ll need to deliver them to his younger self. Next he slips in a ring-binder folder of notes, photos, and newspaper clippings that he uses as reference points. Then Jonas reaches for his tent and sleeping bag, strapping them to the base of his backpack.

“What are you doing?” asks Claudia, frowning at him as she hangs up her gun.

“I’m packing my camping gear,” he says in response to her perplexed look.

She shakes her head at him. “Jonas…you’re going back to a time before the apocalypse. Get yourself a hotel room, for God’s sake. Take a hot shower. Order room service...” She pulls open a desk drawer and takes out the roll of euros that they have scavenged, but not been able to spend for so many years. “In fact, stay at the Waldhotel in town. I’m sure that Regina will be pleased to have a guest.”

Claudia smiles wistfully as she hands him the wad of notes. Jonas stuffs them in his pocket, feeling nervous about this return to civilization after so long living feral in the apocalyptic wilds. When he was younger, Jonas yearned for nothing more than to somehow get back to his childhood home. Traveling to 2019 is the closest that he’s come. He could see his mother again in this time. He could see Martha. His heart sinks, thinking that he probably won’t. He doesn’t want to scare them by revealing himself as an older, haggard and scarred version of the boy they will lose. But if all goes to plan, they will never have to miss him. The timeline will be healed. They won’t remember him ever existing. No, this is not a homecoming. He’ll be more like an intruder in the life of his younger self. He wonders if this is how his father had felt in the years after Mikkel was born and he no longer wanted to leave the house, certainly not to attend parties at the Nielsons.

Instead, Jonas finds himself feeling saddened over leaving the bunker. This place has become a home to him over the years, even if it has been a much lonelier one in the last decade. These days, Jonas uses the shadows of the neighbouring Doppler cabin to grow his own mushroom crops. He’s pushed the empty beds and bare crib against the wall, but still left the blankets in them, as if their former occupants might come back and sleep over one night. He knows that they won’t. Rather these beds serve as graves for three people who are dead to Jonas, even if they are still living in other parts of town or other periods in time. The bones of their old dog Gretchen are buried out by the washing line too. Their poor rescue pet only survived for two years but they had cherished every day she had been with them. Jonas remembers how he and Elizabeth had cried and held hands, while Noah dug the hole and Claudia carved her name on the cross.

The four of them had been so close once. They’d been a family.

“Jonas? Are you feeling ready for this?” asks Claudia, watching him with concern.

He raises his head from his packing and shrugs. “You tell me. You’re the one who seems to know everything.” He swallows, looking her hard in the eye. “I know there are things you’re not telling me. I have always known. Noah knew it too and he thought I was a fool for trusting you.” He winces, looking away. “I’m not as gullible as you think.”

Claudia sinks into the chair at the desk, looking ashamed, seeming like she had wanted to avoid this conversation. Jonas is glad she isn’t trying to deny it. He’s let her keep her secrets, whatever they are, all these years. Often, he’s caught her flicking through this small leather-bound notebook that he assumes is her diary. Claudia always keeps it inside her jacket, close to her heart. He’s never tried to steal it to search for the answers he is sure she’s hiding from him. He always hoped she’d just tell him the truth one day.

“There are some things I felt I needed to keep from you,” Claudia confesses with a sigh. “I didn’t want to say anything that might put you off the path we both know you have to take.”

Jonas walks over and perches on the desk beside her.

“And what do you think now?” he asks.

“Now I think your mind is set, along with your future.” Jonas frowns at Claudia before she clarifies. “Your final mission, when it comes, will succeed in changing things. That much I am certain of. But until then, events must play out as they always have.”

Jonas nods in dull acceptance. He’s already bracing himself for the tearful screams of his teenage self. He knows he’s going to leave the kid behind that locked door. He has to. But then he’ll take the time apparatus to the caves and he will destroy the wormhole before its darkness consumes this town and every person living it. His final mission as Claudia calls it. Jonas has to see it through, even knowing it’s the last thing he’ll do.

“I understand all of that,” he insists. “Nothing’s going to stop me.”

“I believe you,” she says. “That’s why I feel like it’s high time I told you.”

He flinches, his heartbeat throbbing like a wound. “Tell me what?”

Claudia lowers her stare to a stack of papers on the desk. The small collection of pencil drawings Jonas has sketched over the years. He’s never had any natural artistic talent like his father. As a teenager he had preferred photography to picking up a pencil. But he’s had plenty of time to practice the craft since. Jonas would try to copy the likenesses of the pictures he and Claudia have hung on the wall, with the threads linked between them representing their family ties. If Jonas doesn’t have a photo, he’ll try to sketch a person from memory.

That’s what he did for his drawing of Silja, trying his best to recreate the girl’s scarred face from his memories of her in the 2050s and the glimpses he has seen of her out on patrol with the rest of the Sic Mundus militia.

This is the drawing that Claudia now lifts in her hand.

“You always wanted to know how she fits into all of this,” she says. “And I’ve always told you that I have no idea.”

Jonas tenses, his skin prickling. “But you do know, don’t you?”

She nods. “Yes. The other Claudia told me.”

“The other Claudia?” he asks, frowning.

“I mean, my older self,” she says hastily, as if to clarify and not to correct herself. “She explained it all those years ago when she came to me in the eighties. She told me that I shouldn’t tell you. At least, not until I thought you were ready to hear it.”

Jonas’s stare flits from the drawing back to Claudia’s mismatched eyes.

“Who is she? Please. I don’t want there to be any lies between us.”

Claudia’s face pinches, as she rises to her feet and walks over to their wall of photos. She holds up the drawing and tapes it to the bricks just below the picture of Jonas aged sixteen. She takes a spool of thread from her deep pockets and begins to stretch it out.

“The girl will not stay here for much longer. Next year, she’ll travel too.”

“Travel where?” Jonas asks, his eyes on the string.

“To Winden in the year 1890,” Claudia says, taping the thread to his Silja picture then pulling it down. “This is where she will meet your school friend and my grandson, Bartosz. Later she’ll become his wife.”

His eyes widen. “Silja? She’s the girl Bartosz married?” Another thought occurs to him and he shudders. “Then she…she’s Noah’s mother. Not his daughter, but his mother!”

Claudia nods, looping her string around the link between Bartosz and Silja and then pulling it over to the newspaper article about Noah’s arrival in Winden in the 1950s, posing as a preacher.

“Noah…he never liked to talk about his mother,” Jonas recalls. “He just said she died when he was very young, and I didn’t ask anything more. I…I always thought that Bartosz must have just married some girl who was born in that time.” He squints at Silja’s picture again. “But how was it that she became a traveler in the first place?”

“Because of her parents. Because of the people who she was born to.”

Jonas looks at Claudia expectantly. She breaks off a new piece of thread, fixing it to Silja’s picture again and this time pulling it up to the right, fastening it to the photo of Hannah.

“Mama…” he whispers. “She…she had another child. But… _when_?”

“After she travelled to the past,” says Claudia.

“My mother travelled? So…you're saying that she escaped? That she didn’t die in the apocalypse? She went back in time and had a daughter?” He blinks, realizing. “So I…I have a sister?”

Claudia doesn’t answer. She is still moving her string, from Hannah all the way left across the wall to the two pictures of her father, Egon Tiedemann. The man who Jonas knew as the kindly old police inspector who had given him a ride to the hospital and asked him if Satanism was a current craze among the 80s youth. Claudia fixes the end of her thread to him.

“ _We_ have a sister,” she says at last, stepping back from the wall.

Jonas falls silent, his eyes filling with tears. Because now he’s wondering why little Silja was stolen away from her parents and abandoned in the wastes of the future. Now he’s cursing his snap decision to hand the child over to Elizabeth when he should’ve brought her back to the bunker. The girl should have been raised here, by her two long lost siblings. They were her real family.

And these aren’t even the darkest thoughts going through his mind.

“I’m not the only one on this wall who is wrong, am I?”

Jonas has known this for a long time, but it’s the first time he’s said it out loud, his voice heavy and bitter. He has known that Noah was a product of time travel for years. And now Silja too, the sister he never knew he had. His sister who isn’t meant to exist either.

“Yes, you're not the only child born to travelers,” Claudia confirms. “You're not the only one who won't be born if this knot is ever undone.” She turns to face him, tilting her head in sympathy. “You see why I didn’t want to tell you? Because if you succeed this time…”

“Will I really succeed this time?” Jonas blurts, his voice breaking and all his doubts spilling out. “You say that I can change everything. That I’m the one who can bring an end to all this. But how do I know I can trust you? If you’re lying to me now, I swear I’ll…”

“…you’ll never forgive me,” Claudia finishes for him. “I know. And I wouldn't blame you. But I promise you that I’m on your side in all this, Jonas. You have to have faith in that. We’ve always wanted the same things, you and me. We both want to save people and to restore a better world.” She turns her crinkled eyes back to the wall. “But that cannot happen without sacrifice.”

Jonas wipes his eyes, still wishing there was a way to save the world for destruction without erasing anyone but himself. He reaches for his drawing of Silja, tugging it down from the wall along with all the threads that connect her to their family trees.

“My...my younger self will be arriving here soon,” he says, stuffing the picture into his pockets, the picture that he never saw on the wall. “He’s better off not knowing who Silja is. He already has enough shocks and losses to deal with.”

Claudia nods, solemnly. “Should I not have told you?”

Jonas considers this for a moment. Then he reaches for Claudia and pulls her gently into a hug, her long grey hair sticking to his tear-stained face. She raises her arms in surprise, not seeming sure of what to do with them at first. Then he feels her slowly pressing her hands to his back. Jonas sighs and squeezes her close. Claudia might be no good at hugging people, but he is.

“I needed to hear the truth from someone. I’m glad it was you.”

They stand holding each other a few seconds longer. Jonas senses this may be the last time they'll see one another. Eventually they separate and he returns to his packing, while Claudia just stands very still, staring up at the wall. She talks over their plan a few more times, telling Jonas nothing he doesn’t already know. Her voice becomes flatter and colder the longer she speaks, a little less like a mother faced with her son leaving home. Jonas says nothing, just shoulders his rucksack, picks up the time machine, and heads for the door.

“Jonas,” Claudia calls after him. “You must never lose hope.”

He turns back, holding her stare. He prays she’s not deceiving him.

Jonas knows he’ll have hope for as long as he can trust her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Big gushing thanks to everyone who has been reading and giving kudos to this fic, with very special thanks to those of you who have left such thoughtful encouraging comments throughout. I'd not intended to write another fic as long as 'Wanderers in the Darkness' but (oops!) I think this one has turned out longer. Much of this unexpected extended length is due to getting such excellent feedback that often sparked new ideas and gave me so much more to write about. For those of you who love reading about the apocalypse years, I have to rec the story 'Blood Bank' by her_black_tights which does an excellent job of filling in more gaps in the time between 2052-53. I'm gonna take a break from ficcing myself, but I'm really looking forward to reading more of what all my fellow Dark writers post!


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